Rev103 that was just committed to svn includes support for clustering multiple machines over the local network. This feature was often requested as it allows to use hardware much more effectively.

How it works:

Pyrit has a new command ‘serve‘ that starts a server on the current host. A server listens for connections on port 19935 (setup those firewalls…) and can use the local hardware to compute for other clients.

Clients can use multiple servers and each server can support multiple clients simultaneously.

This is not a distributed database! The clients transfer their workunits to the servers and the servers compute the results and send them back. Bandwidth is a problem: 10.000 PMKs/s require about 30kb/s from the client to the server and about 300kb/s from the server to the client. This makes internet-connections too slow for most of us…